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We are attempting to use Acronis TrueImage to copy the hard drive from one standalone Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5-based computer across to two others as part of a production operation. We are using a single SATA drive with no RAID and no network storage. The three computers are all specced to identical configurations.

The imaging operation succeeds fine, but as soon as we attempt to boot one of the imaged drives on one of the other computers, it blows up very early in booting because LVM does not recognize the UUIDs of the volumes. Note that RHEL5.5 uses LVM for the root partition (everything other than /boot, to be precise). The imaged drives work fine in the computer from which the image was generated, but do not work in the other computers, suggesting that something in the disk controller causes the UUID to be sufficiently different that LVM gets confused.

Are there any special tricks to setting up an LVM-based system so that it will play nicely when it is bit-for-bit imaged across to physically different (but identically specced) hardware? We're willing to take some up-front hit when configuring the first system to make the restore procedure as simple as possible, ideally just "restore the image and boot".

qid
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    Are you sure Acronis is doing a bit-for-bit image? I thought it was more intelligent then that. – Zoredache Dec 21 '11 at 22:16
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    Can you post here the messages before kernel panic? – cstamas Dec 22 '11 at 00:21
  • I believe Acronis is more intelligent about Windows filesystems, and perhaps straight Linux filesystems, but I don't think it groks LVM and just makes a bit-for-bit image (it does compress it though). As a result it ends up being much larger. – qid Dec 22 '11 at 13:59
  • Ok, for a test, try a simple copy with dd. – Zoredache Dec 22 '11 at 17:09

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